right now the astronauts are calling houston because the computer on the spaceship is running two instances of microsoft outlook and they can't figure out why. nasa is about to remote into the computer

Craft and rigour still matter in software development, because a codebase that's hard to understand for humans seems to be hard to understand for AI agents too.

Fileside 2 beta is go!

Today I'm testing the release candidates for the first beta of Fileside 2...

Turns out Gemini Flash 3 is almost as capable a coding agent as Opus 4.6, at a 10th of the cost! It's my default model in Cursor now.

New header is taking shape...

Not long until first Fileside 2 beta now... It's amazing how much easier it is to add new features after the full refactoring of the app architecture.

After a fresh round of UI library research, I think I will start relying more on ark-ui.com than on www.radix-ui.com for future needs. PandaCSS from the same team looks good too!

Finally Fileside has a thumbnail grid.

One small commit for man, one giant leap for Fileside. After months of disentangling, we've finally arrived at a clean cut between native and renderer worlds.

And now the final piece of the migration puzzle is also in place.

One checkbox closer to Fileside 2.0. Search has now also been migrated to the new worker process architecture.

Fileside 2 progress update: All file operations have now been converted to (optionally) run in separate worker processes, freeing up the UI during long transfers.

Fileside's Black Friday sale has started. 66% off on a lifetime license up until Cyber Monday 1 Dec. Get it while it's hot! www.fileside.app

After last week's announcement, 80 people have signed up as beta testers for Fileside 2. This should be a fun release cycle!

Just published an update on the plan for Fileside 2.0 and how the work is progressing. www.fileside.app/blog/2025-10...

She's my new hero. This is soo good. www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMoz...

A method in a class gets created once, then reused. A function in a React function component gets recreated once per instance (or even every render if you forget useCallback). Now add this up for a data-dense view like a directory listing with 100s of individual cells.

Just vibecoded the remainder of my Trello notes away into my custom Markdown-file-based Kanban setup in less time than it took to listen through Carl Craig's Songs about Food and Revolutionary Art.

It's 2025 and we can finally generate dynamic colours using just CSS in production. The syntax takes some getting used to, but it's so handy for all those little brighten/darken/saturate/desaturate tweaks you need in every UI.

This is so true. ffmpeg is a beast, it can do absolutely anything with audio/video if you just utter the right incantation. I doubt more than a handful of people in the universe truly understand its internals.

Today I discovered that saturation can go backwards in CSS. Who'd have thought.

The sycophancy level has been ramped up so much in current coding agents. Hard not to get the impression they're just telling me what I want to hear when every single prompt is "absolutely right", "raising a very valid and important point", "a nuanced and insightful remark" and so on.

Thanks to this lovely review, Fileside got a whole host of new users over the weekend. www.xda-developers.com/windows-file...

Decided to bring in Tanstack Table as a view model for the file listings, and though well-engineered, I'm not entirely sure that it doesn't actually increase complexity rather than reduce it.

Quite striking how much of the decision-making process in software development is aesthetic in nature. AI has made the distinction between "generating code" and "developing software" very clear. By being good at the former, it's highlighted how much taste and intuition plays into the latter. 👇

It all starts with a neat little generic parameter, and before you know it you've become an inveterate hyper typer. pscanf.com/s/341/

The Clerk team seems to have come up with an actual valid reason to use an emoji in code. The lock functions as a delimiter between "public" and "private" CSS classes.

Excellent no-nonsense tool for mapping out trails on a map: trailrouter.com Google Maps' Measure Distance tool works well, but infuriatingly won't let you save your drawn trails. With Trail Router, it's all in the URL. Elegantly simple and sufficient.

Saying "right paren", "right bracket" etc became too annoying, so I came up with new spoken forms for the brackets commonly used in code. { }: curly/wurly [ ]: hooky/wooky ( ): frown/smile

Feels good to finally see some effects of the reworked internals reach the UI. Layouts now have a dirty and an active state with corresponding visual indicators.

I’m positively surprised at how usable voice control is today, and how proficient I was able to get in four weeks. This blog post details my journey so far. www.fileside.app/blog/2025-04...

Feels like I've finally cracked how to work productively with an LLM on the Fileside codebase. It's a combination of me getting better at providing the right context, and just sheer capability increase of the latest models. Now moved from Claude 3.7 to Gemini 2.5 Pro as the default driver.

Fileside 2 is progressing slowly but surely. With a lot of the supporting infra finished, I am now tackling the core of the layout and lister implementations. Both extensibility and maintainability are going to be infinitely improved once this is done.

Crazy how the way I go about my daily work as a software engineer has changed more in the last 6 months than in the previous 20 years.

Interesting to note that the vanilla JS examples for Tanstack Table use nanostores. tanstack.com/table/latest... I guess good coders know good code when they see it.

Give this man a Nobel prize. This is such brilliant work. www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcUJ...

My RSI got bad enough that I started investigating how to go full voice control, using @whitep4nth3r.com's helpful blog post whitep4nth3r.com/blog/how-i-l... as a starting point. Apple Voice Control proved woefully inadequate. Now starting to climb the steep learning curve that is Talon Voice.

This video by Andrej Karpathy is essentially The Missing Manual for Generative AI: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWvN... Highly recommended for non-technical and technical audiences alike.

To spare my poor wrists, I decided to give voice input a go. Installed MacWhisper and have been using speech-to-text to drive a substantial chunk of my daily work for 2 days. Surprised at how seamless the transition was!

One of Tailwind's main selling points is that it frees you from having to think of names for things. But naming things (a.k.a. creating abstractions) is one of the most useful tools we have for managing complexity in software projects. I even find it enjoyable to come up with good naming schemes.

Just put out a maintenance release for Fileside 1.9 to fix a few issues helpfully reported by users. www.fileside.app/blog/2025-03... Autoupdates will be enabled tomorrow barring nothing unexpected turning up.

Implementing Doom using only the TypeScript type system has got to be the most perverse thing ever accomplished in the history of software engineering! The level of this guy's tolerance for self-inflicted suffering boggles the mind. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mCs...

Finally! We can now insert good old-fashioned tabs again without going insane. F8 is my new "AI go forth" key. It took a while but kudos to the Cursor team for listening to their users.

Possibly the most frightening aspect of AI coding agents is that we'll soon live in a world where all front-end code is React with Tailwind.

Trello UX is just sinking further with every update Atlassian makes. Really need to find an alternative.

Fileside v2 update: Still very much working my way through the bowels of the application. Vite setup, DI infra, IPC, settings, window manager, error reporting, logger, autoupdater, command dispatcher and undo service are done. Hoping to get onto moving actual features over soon.

Did you know software can be organic too? Organic software: - Has no external pressure to chase funding and grow - Has clear pricing, discloses its sources of funding and revenue - Does not sell user data to third parties to make money Principles Fileside is happy to abide by!

"The LLM Curve of Impact on Software Engineers" hits the nail on the head regarding the usefulness of LLMs for coding. As the maintainer of a medium-sized and fairly custom codebase that I wrote myself, I very much fall within the trough labelled as Senior here.

New definition of BDD: Beauty-Driven Development Will extracting an interface out as a well-defined, semantically coherent and orthogonal type affect the bottom line? No. Will it increase the amount of beauty in the world? Yes. Thus it should be done.